


Ashes Around Your Neck

by starrelia



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Alternate Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon Divergence, Cisgender, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2018-08-09 15:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7807594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starrelia/pseuds/starrelia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how Rhys's story begins-- with his own hand, wrapping around his throat and killing him.</p><p>And this is not how his story will end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ashes Around Your Neck

His story begins with a metallic hand clasping at his throat, crushing as it cuts off all his air, and Rhys gasps and chokes for air. His story begins here—truly and surely—where he once thought that he has killed Handsome Jack; arm, eye and port all having been ripped out and strewn across a once golden office that has bathed itself in the lavender hue of extravagant wealth and now drowns in the dark, midnight blue of Pandora.

That is how it all really begins; he lives and breathes in the air, free of Jack’s presence and crushing grip, and Rhys gasps like a fish out of water. He doesn’t ever remember truly breathing until now, not when his hero is nothing more than strewn and broken cybernetics and replacements that spread all across the wrecked floor.

What is more a few weeks or so feels like ten years, a decade of listening to Jack; trusting him, and being _burnt_ by the lapping flame of the other. He thinks, once upon a time, that perhaps with Jack, he can be great.

But now all his dreams have crashed and burned – quite literally, when he looks around him – and Handsome Jack is dead once more. He looks at his eye, takes it in, and inhales and drops it to the floor and leaves it there.

It is with a limp and a whimper that he grabs the deed to Atlas, exhaling smoke and blue whites and zeroes, and it’s with a pained cry that he drags himself out of the wreckage a good distance before blood loss and pain forces him to crumble.

 

The rest is vague, blurred memories, crossing lines when Rhys can’t remember how he has survived, what he has done, and he returns to the Atlas dome once more to work and work and work.

Jack doesn’t hang over him anymore, but he shakes like an addict on withdrawal and his eyes are sunken, hollow, blackness spread around – how can one sleep when the days are so long, anyway? – and giving him a deathly look.

It definitely isn’t helped by the missing iris, the missing arm, and the emptiness present in his skull. But he works, and he works until his arm is replaced, until he can actually make himself a prosthetic eye, and until he’s able to make a non-functioning port to make the emptiness go away.

There is nothing in him that is working anymore, and Rhys smiles bitterly at that thought. But it doesn’t matter now – not really, not anymore – when he has Atlas in his hands, and is going to rebuild it as best he can.

He has never felt more alone than he has now, and he takes strength from that.

 

Months he works, and months he walks around finding whoever that is still _sane_ on this crapsack planet, taking them in and getting them to work for him. He pointedly steers clear of Sanctuary – if they see him, he’s more than certain they’ll kill him on sight, splattering his brain on the floor and leaving him as nothing more than a dead memory.

He’s not Hyperion, doesn’t look or wear Atlas, but he looks _expensive._ There is nothing to gain from someone who looks expensive and alive, instead of broken and fighting. Wherever there is civilisation, wherever he can find any trace of intelligent life, Rhys takes and takes until Atlas begins to produce once more, until Athena hunts him down and sees who it is that is spreading silver and magenta weapons to the ungrateful masses.

She leaves him be, and Rhys gives her a gift to give to Janey. He doesn’t carry the _‘sin’_ of Atlas on his shoulders, is everything but those who hired her to kill her sister, and Rhys smiles sweetly with venom building up in his mouth when she glares at him and _leaves._

But that doesn’t stop him from working constantly. The dome is where Atlas is now, and that is where Atlas will stay, and Athena will do nothing of it.

 

Months later, he hires her as his bodyguard, offers Janey and her money that they cannot refuse, and Athena wears rosy silver.

 

 When he gets the ECHO from ‘Fiona’ to meet with her, Rhys wants to break his ECHO communicator. When he gets the ECHO from Fiona, Rhys wants to scream at the ECHO communicator until all his frustration, all his hate is free. When he gets the ECHO… Rhys grabs a pistol and shoots at the wall until he’s out of ammo.

Athena follows him, hidden in the shadows like the assassin she’s trained to be, and Rhys heads off to find where Fiona is. “Don’t attack until it’s absolutely necessary,” Rhys says to Athena, “don’t attack until I’ve made the signal.”

 

And she listens. She listens to him, and she follows – he can feel her close, even when his ECHO communicator is abandoned and he has to rely on his instincts that Athena still follows him. After all, she’s his bodyguard, and he pays her a good deal of money.

So he hopes and hopes that she’s still following him, even when he’s forced to recall a prequel of his actual story, of where he has begun, and even when he has to deal with the sight of Fiona again. When he sees her, he holds the anger and hatred in.

Jack hates her, seethes, and traces of it linger in Rhys’s mind, clinging like a parasite desperate to live. But he swallows the brutal words down – _No good Pandoran scum! –_ and says hello.

Fiona looks away. Rhys smiles still. The Stranger slams his shotgun against Rhys’s head and the pain isn’t any worse than what he has had to face all alone when he has tried to rebuild himself, rebuild Atlas.

[But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.]

 

When it comes time for them to hunt the vault, when the Stranger is revealed and Loader Bot is the one who has done all this, he unthinkingly gives the signal and Athena drops down and – with practiced ease – slices the robot’s head off and ends his existence. Fiona’s knocked cold in her indignant rage, and Vaughn stays away from the conflict.

Gortys reminds frozen in time, and Rhys thinks them all better for abandoning the vault before it can get any worse. He passes by Fiona, Athena follows, and guilt gnaws at his gut.

But when he’s drank ten glasses of alcohol back at the base, it’s all forgotten and he pukes up whatever feeling of guilt and self-hatred that lingers. Jack may have been a madman, but Rhys remembers and knows – far too well – that sacrifice has to be made for all that one must do.

 

Vaughn contacts him, asks him how he’s doing, and Rhys speaks to him manipulatively, hidden by kind words and tone and conversations of friendship, to join Atlas.

He asks for Yvette, and Vaughn tells him that she’s dead. He drinks more alcohol that day.

 

One day, when Atlas is still growing [and it’ll always grow, because Rhys will never be fine until he’s better than Jack in every way] and everything has settled, Rhys learns from a Child of Helios that they have seen someone who looks eerily similar to Jack.

At first, he suspects it to be Timothy Lawrence – Jack has mentioned him, once or twice or ten times, wishing for him back and then changing to angered screaming for memories he doesn’t know – and asks the woman to merely check. Then, when she comes back and tells him that it _is_ Jack, talks like Jack, acts like him, Rhys feels his blood run cold.

Someone has found his eye, and his port. Someone has surely brought Jack back. He calls Athena in, tells her with hushed voice and frantic words that she needs to check for him, stake it out, _stalk and see_ if the woman is right or if she’s just mistaken.

 

Athena is gone for weeks and weeks, and Rhys goes back to running his company with snake smiles and bitter bonds; if Torgue is dead two weeks later, it cannot be pinned on Atlas. If Jakobs loses its latest shipment and has to sign a deal with Rhys, it cannot be pinned on Atlas. If Maliwan’s blueprints are missing and their finances relying on Atlas’s funding, it cannot be pinned on Atlas.

Everything Rhys does is for the good of his own company, and everything he does is to advance them further in the competition. Nothing more, nothing less, and there is nothing personal at all about everything that he does.

Vaughn wonders, more than once, and Rhys spends days with him to keep him from leaving and doing something that he really, really does not want the other to do.

It makes his heart ache with old friendship, and heavy guilt. So he drinks, and drinks until he’s crying over Yvette, over the fact that he isn’t _functioning_ anymore, and he cries until Vaughn has to take him back to his room and lay him down on the bed. The next day, Rhys doesn’t acknowledge what has happened and continues to carry his grief to his grave.

 

When Athena comes back, her words are harsh and angry and Rhys trembles. “It’s Jack,” she says, anger lacing through easily, “I want to kill him. Let me— _let me kill the asshole._ He deserves it!”

“I want to meet him.” Rhys says, and Athena looks him over suspiciously and he exhales all the smoke still left behind from so long ago. “I want to kill him myself. Let me do it—let me do it. Please— _I deserve this,_ I deserve to be the one to kill him! I deserve to be the one to get rid of him once and for all! _Please, let me have this.”_

And she does. She helps him go to where Jack is hidden away with his scientists – people who he remembers used to work for Hyperion, but now wander aimlessly – and Rhys goes in when Jack is alone, surrounded by no one but memories, and Athena heads off to kill off the scientists so that they don’t interrupt.

Rhys deserves this. He’s deserved this for months. This is _his_ right.

Despite all the anger he thinks he needs to feel, all that lurks under his skin is a cold deep acceptance of the fact that Jack is still – and forever – his hero.

Rhys has a plan. He grabs a pendant, one that he has saved for a special occasion, and wears it for this one trip. The expensive pendant will be nothing more than cheap jewellery after all this.

Jack is his hero. Jack needs to go.

 

_Never meet your heroes, kid. They’re all dicks. Every last one of them._

When Rhys sees him again, and when Jack sees him again, it almost feels too surreal to be true. Someone – whoever it is – has gone to such an awful length to give Jack a body so similar to his original one; he wonders what they did for it.

Did they kill Timothy? Did they manage to scavenge parts to change someone else’s corpse? Whatever it is that they have done, Rhys doesn’t care. What he does care for is the horrified surprise that is clear on Jack’s face, something that the man has never felt before.

This is the man that has fallen on his knees before Rhys and has _begged_ for his life. This is the man that has wrapped Rhys’s own hand around his throat and begins squeezing. This is the man that Rhys looks up to, that still hangs heavy over his heart and lingers in the back of his head like an ugly habit.

“ _Rhys._ ” Jack exhales sulphur, all fire and heat, and even being near him makes him feel the deep, hot magma that runs through Pandora’s arteries. “What the _hell_ are you **_doing here!?_** ”

There’s a gun hidden on Rhys’s person, but he doesn’t bring it out—no. He merely steps forward and smiles. “Handsome goddamn Jack.” Rhys murmurs, a small condensation cloud forming for half a second before it fades away, and he feels joy in his veins for the very, very first time. “I wanted to see my hero again.”

Jack stares at him as if Rhys is a stranger, as if he’s never seen him before, and he wonders what it is that he sees now. Though everything else in Atlas is silver, Rhys wears gold. Though everything else in Atlas covers itself in a pink hue, Rhys wears orange and yellow.

Surely to his _hero,_ he looks more Hyperion than he does Atlas. Yet, surely his _hero_ also knows who he is now. “What are you _doing here_?” Jack asks again, heat and anger in his voice, rising and rising and burning at Rhys’s skin as he feels his flame lap at his skin once more.

But Rhys feels merely cool; he doesn’t have the magma that runs through Jack’s veins, arteries, and he steps forward and smiles still. “Rhys—stay the _hell_ away from me! Where the hell are my – _where’s my gun?!_ Shit—“

Nothing about Jack looks in control now. He scrambles in his search, tries to find something to defend himself against Rhys with and—no, there is no shield on him either. Just like before, Jack crumbles on his knees and presses his hand against his face – scarred and without his mask, with eyes wide in horror – and looks over to Rhys. “Not again.” He exhales.

“No,” Rhys says, “your hand isn’t around me throat this time.” When Jack moves to lunge at him, he pulls his gun out and aims between the eyes.

He doesn’t miss.

 

Later, when Athena is told to go back and that he’ll follow after, Rhys drags Jack’s body away and burns his body until there’s nothing left but ash and he scoops a small bit of it up into the pendant. It’s a very, very small amount, and he knows – absolutely knows – it won’t slip out once he closes it.

 

 

The fire that once burns Rhys affects him no longer; though Jack may have once been Pandora, hot and scalding, Rhys is now Elpis; cold, freezing. Around his neck hangs Jack’s ashes.

 

That is how his story ends; no longer with his hero hanging over his head, strong and alive still, but instead with his hero around his throat as a soon to fade memory. Jack may be a legend, but Rhys shall be a new reality.

 

Never meet your heroes. You’ll kill them in the end.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr over here!](http://www.starrelia.tumblr.com)


End file.
